AI helps young man read 2,000-year-old scroll and win a hefty prize
AI is transforming many aspects of human life, and it has even helped a young man win a US$40,000 prize for reading text on a 2,000-year-old scroll.
Luke Farritor, 21, a student at the University of Nebraska, has just won a US$40,000 prize for a groundbreaking scientific discovery.
Farritor is the first person to read text on the ancient scrolls as part of the Vesuvius Challenge (a competition offering US$1 million in prizes to anyone who can unlock the secrets of the ancient scrolls using modern technology).
Why can't the ancient scrolls be read the normal way?
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, Pompeii was not the only town wiped out. Torrents of volcanic debris and searing heat reached as far as the wealthy city of Herculaneum, in what is now Italy.
The intense heat instantly turned hundreds of scrolls into carbonized lumps, which then lay buried under volcanic mud for about 1,700 years until they were excavated in 1752.
Any attempt to unroll the ancient scrolls, which now resemble lumps of charcoal, would damage them beyond repair.
Speaking to Nature, Federica Nicolardi, a member of the academic committee that reviewed Farritor's discovery, described them as crazy objects, all of them crumpled and squashed.
Seth Parker and Brent Seales of the Digital Restoration Initiative. (Photo: UK Photo) How did AI read the text on the ancient scroll?
Unable to unroll the scrolls in the usual way, researchers turned to X-rays and machine learning to read the scrolls word by word.
As part of the Vesuvius Challenge, the University of Kentucky recruited scientists to use AI to analyze the words in the scrolls.
To win the prize, Farritor needed to detect at least 10 legible letters on a scroll. Working on an area smaller than one square inch, Farritor's algorithm detected several letters, including one complete word.
Image of text from the ancient scroll, with ancient Greek letters highlighted in purple. (Photo: University of Kentucky)
Farritor is the first person to read a word in the scrolls and was awarded US$40,000 by the Vesuvius Challenge. "When I saw these letters, I totally freaked out," he said at a press briefing.
Luke Farritor used machine learning to make the X-ray images of the scroll clear enough to be read.
According to Nicolardi, a professor at the University of Naples Federico II, the ancient Greek word reads "πορφυρας" meaning "purple dye" or "purple cloth."
Although there is not enough context yet to understand what the scroll says, she believes scholars will soon be able to read more of the text. "I think this will be a great revolution" in the field of papyrology.
She noted that these are previously unknown texts, which makes deciphering them of great interest to scholars.
The future of the undeciphered scrolls
Twelve brown fragments of an opened ancient scroll known as P.Herc.118. (Photo: University of Oxford).
With so many scrolls still unread, at the time a grand prize worth US$700,000 was still up for grabs. To win, a team will have to read four passages from two scanned scrolls.
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